Steven J. Heyman (Chicago-Kent College of Law - Illinois Institute of Technology) has posted Hate-Speech Bans Are Consonant with Liberal Principles - Chapter (The Oxford Handbook of Hate Speech, edited by Eric Heinze, Natalie Alkiviadou, Tom Herrenberg, Sejal Parmar and.
Flemming Rose is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He is the former foreign affairs editor at the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten (Jutlands Post), as the paper’s culture editor, he commissioned the famous “Muhammad cartoons” that were published in 2005 and sparked the international Cartoon Crisis of 2006. (Free Inquiry published a selection of those cartoons in its April/May 2006 issue.) In 2014, Cato published his book, The Tyranny of Silence: How One Cartoon Ignited a Global Debate on the Future of Free Speech. This article was adapted with permission from Rose’s Foreword to The Fall and Rise of Blasphemy Law, edited by Paul Cliteur and Tom Herrenberg (Leiden University Press, 2016). References in the text not otherwise attributed refer to other articles in that anthology.
Mirjam van Schaik is lecturer and researcher at Leiden University, the Netherlands. She has degrees in law and philosophy, and her main research interests lie in the fields of legal and political philosophy more specifically, the freedom of religion, blasphemy laws, and the separation of church and state. This article is condensed and adapted from a much lengthier and fully annotated essay in The Fall and Rise of Blasphemy Law, edited by Paul Cliteur and Tom Herrenberg (Leiden University Press, 2016).
“The issue driving the government’s motivation to keep the blasphemy law was the holy book of a specific eligion and its prophet, not holy books and prophets in general."
“In one severe abuse of freedom of religion, religious freedom has been amalgamated with political strategies or policies of protecting the reputation of religions against defamation."